Wednesday, January 20, 2016

The Hermead and the Pathetic Fallacy

The Hermead and the Pathetic Fallacy

The British critic John Ruskin coined the term "Pathetic Fallacy" in his book Modern Painters. Ruskin developed the Pathetic Fallacy as a literary term that describes the tendency for writers to attribute human emotions, characteristics, and conduct to Nature as a way of personifying inanimate objects.

I would relate this to what I would call the Theist Fallacy as well, which is the act of attributing consciousness to the vast universe. Consciousness is limited to the chemically-based organic functions of the brain.

I feel it is why most epics of the past ultimately fail in presenting accurate guiding principles of life, because in all of them the poet composed text to present a world view that assumes nature is controlled by a conscious creator. Any epic based on the Theist Fallacy fails as a valid cultural text because it presents a false view of the universe.

The Iliad and Odyssey, the Mahabharata, the Aeneid, the Divine Comedy, the Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost all fail because they present a universe controlled by a conscious God that does not exist. The Canterbury Tales and the Plays of Shakespeare present a world view where a conscious God is irrelevant or imagined by its characters, so they better succeed as valid texts.

In the Hermead, my epic poem that presents the lives and ideas of ancient Greek philosophers, I swerve from the assumption of the Theist Fallacy, and present a world view without a conscious God, yet with conscious humans who explore that world and attempt to explain its substance and functions through mechanical processes. Based more on scientific research than theology, the Hermead presents a more accurate view of the world.

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About Me

I am a cartographer, geospatial analyst, and terrain developer by day, and epic poet by night.

I am writing an epic poem in blank verse titled Hermead about scientists and inventors of civilization. This bible for atheists and scientists is now 120,000 lines of blank verse covering the lives of 25 Greek philosophers.

I posted about 200 songs I wrote and composed at http://youtube.com/surazeus but do not expect anything more than amateur fun folk singing.

I was born in Oregon in the Year of the Beatles, grew up in Texas in the 1970s, went to high school and college in Takoma (Washington state) in the 1980s. I earned a Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts in 1988 at Washington State University. After living in Seattle for a few years, I hitchhiked around the country playing grunge folk in the 1990s.

I got a job as web designer at State of Michigan 1999-2004, then earned a Master of Science in Geographic Information Science 2005-8 at Michigan State University.

I have since lived in North Carolina and now in Georgia working as a cartographer. Where will I go next on the journey of life? My goal is to become a Professor of Literature at Harvard, which was founded by my ancestor, Thomas Dudley.

I married an Indonesian Muslim woman from Java Island and we have two cute daughters I named for goddesses of wisdom -- Saraswati and Athena.

I am generally a Gnostic Humanist. I do not know if there is a God or not, but the gods of history were humans who had a large influence on their times. What is most important is that I know myself and understand my perceptions, and recreate them in verse.

I am descended 13 generations from the Puritan Poet Anne Bradstreet. Her father, Thomas Dudley, signed the charter to found Harvard, and was descended from the Sutton-Dudley clan of Elizabethan England, who were descended from Joan of Acre, daughter of King Edward I and Eleanor of Castile.

My religion is Astarism.

Astarism honors First Mother Astara Ishtar Athena.

Ishtar sent Abraham and Sarah west and they founded Assurism, Olympism, Apollonism, Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Sufism, and all their branches and offshoots.

Ishtar sent Brahma and Saraswati east and they founded Hinduism, Vaishnism, Shaivism, Buddhism, Krishnaism, Sikhism, and all their branches and offshoots.